News Archive: 2014

Another chance to provide a loan and support the work we do.

You may remember that just over two years ago we installed another 1.5MW of wind turbines with your help. At that time we teamed with Buzzbnk, a crowd-source funding platform and offered the opportunity for our supporters to lend us as little as £5 and earn an annual return.

It was an enormous success and within months we had the wind turbines installed. To date our supporters have all received their interest payments due and the wind turbines continue to earn and turn.

Buzzbnk has now teamed with Trillion Fund whose focus is to channel funds from lenders and investors into renewable energy and we are now listed on their platform.

We need to raise more funds to help implement our work and grow our business. We would like to offer you the chance to earn 5% pa and your money back after 6 years by providing us with a loan.

If this is of interest to you, then please go to trillionfund.com/tcw and download the offer document by registering your details. Or call us on 0117 927 7089 if you unable to access the website.

You could even consider gifting the loan to someone for christmas. A revolutionary thought!

To coincide with Bristol European Green Capital 2015, The Converging World is launching a Bristol-Indian twinned forest project. 100 acres of forest in the Tamil Nadu region (India) will be restored, equating approx. to 1 square meter per person living in Bristol.

Joss Brooks, one of the founding partners of The Converging World’s Bristol-Indian forest project, is sharing his 40 years experience of eco-restoration in a lecture at Bristol Zoo on Tuesday 21st October 2014, at6pm, in partnership with Bristol Zoological Society.

Joss grew up in Tasmania and came to Auroville in India’s Tamil Nadu state in 1970 after living in Europe and Africa. He joined the early pioneering efforts in land restoration at Auroville and founded the Pitchandikulam community in 1973, which is now a vibrant 60 acre forest with 800 species of plants in the grasslands, a nursery and an ethno-medicinal forest.

Joss cleaned up and restored the Chennai basin and has been working on Mangrove restoration along the Tamil Nadu Coast. Mangroves are an important natural barrier to storm surges and flooding from the sea.

In this talk he will take us through his journey of restoring wildlife habitat in South India. This includes the story of creating the sanctuary of Auroville and Pitchandikulam, his work with the Irula tribal snake catchers (setting up a snake venom extraction cooperative) and his work with different materials in creating wildlife art.

For more than 100 years, biospheres, ecosystems and habitats around the world have been gradually destroyed with devastating consequences. Local people who depend upon the flora and fauna have been left marginalised, species are disappearing, there is poor water retention and local and global climatic conditions are changing for the worse because of the destruction of large areas of forests.

Tamil Nadu, India, where our wind farms are located) specifically covers an area of 130,058 Km2 and many areas have been severely deforested over the past few decades to provide for fire wood, agricultural land and development. These activities are important but when it has not been managed carefully the rich natural environment which is needed to support these activities, is severely eroded. It is understood that 2.5% of Tamil Nadu is protected but more is needed so that it can sustain life including its local people and beyond.

Eco-restoration aims to restore these areas with indigenous flora and fauna that can sustain local people for generations to come through the nurture and protection of the natural environment.

The Converging World has partnered with a team led by Joss Brooks based in Auroville, just north of Pondicherry on the east coast of Tamil Nadu to support the eco-restoration of this land.

To celebrate the Bristol as Green Capital of Europe 2015, we are launching phase one of our eco-restoration programme which aims to support the eco-restoration of 100 acres, just over 400,000m2. This is approximately equivalent to the number of people living in Bristol. c400,000.